cfguy

EDIT:  This post is now over 2 years old.  There are now free tools to help you bring your lotus notes data into the 21st century.  Take what I have written with a grain of salt; there are useful links in the comments.  If you have some tips to add, or helpful links, please post them in the comments.

I'm going to describe how to quickly and reliably synchronize your Lotus Notes and Google calendars without purchasing expensive, buggy software. 

Until now I have not been able to get my Lotus Notes work calendar and my personal Google Calendar synced.  Lotus Notes is a proprietary format, and will not by default import any standard calendar filetypes, so it's a no-go on all fronts.

So today I tripped across a  page on IBM's website titled "Notes iCalendar Support ".  Now, having worked with Notes for a few years, I know by now not to get my hopes up.  But I downloaded and installed the app (it integrates into notes), and now have both calendars synced to each other.  It's a manual process, but I'll take what I can get.  Here are the steps I took:

• Download Notes iCalendar Support from IBM's Lotus Sandbox site
• Unzip and run the installer
• Restart Notes

To add your Notes calendar entries to your Google Calendar :

• Open Lotus Notes
  • Hold down shift and click each calendar event you want to copy over
  • Click Actions -> iCalendar -> Export
• Open your Google Calendar
  • Click "Manage Calendars" from the bottom of the left-hand navigation .
  • Click the "Import Calendar" tab.
  • Browse to your newly created iCal file (by default it is in your Notes install folder, under ' \data\iCalendar'.
  • Choose the calendar to import your Notes events into.  I created a new calendar to import into, in order to take advantage of GCal's multi-calendar overlay feature.
  • Click the 'Import' button.
  • Gcal will import your events and display a confirmation summary, and you're done!

To add your Google Calendar entries to Lotus Notes:

• Open your Google Calendar
  • Click "Manage Calendars" from the bottom of the left-hand navigation
  • Click on the title of the calendar you want to export.
  • Click the green ICAL button located in the "Private Address" region.
  • Copy the link provided to your clipboard - rightclick on the link, then choose "Copy Shortcut" or "Copy Link Location".
• Open Lotus Notes
  • Click Actions -> iCalendar -> Import from the file menu
  • Paste the url from your clipboard into the "File name:" box of the resulting dialogue box

And that's it, you're done!